It can’t have been easy, but Adrian Tinniswood and his publishers should be congratulated for issuing this elegant, encyclopaedic and entertaining history of English country house life between the wars without ever once mentioning Downton Abbey. Shamefully, I’m going to do it for them.

The Long Weekend supplies a potent fix of period locations, upstairs-downstairs drama and higher gossip — all of it factual — for the most Downton-addicted of readers. So let’s hope there will be plenty of them. And what a shocking crowd appears in these pages, where dukes and baronets leave the cast of Downton looking tame.

Here’s the fifth Duke of Portland for example, who didn’t want to be seen, so had vast underground galleries built to hide in. He would…

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